TECH EX 05: Project Design
Ideation/Research
For research and ideation, I based my knowledge on the info and links posted in Brightspace and also a lot of images seen on Pinterest.
Preparation + setup
I don’t have a lot of windows in my apartment so the only suitable place was in my living room next to the balcony door. I don’t get a lot of light in my apartment so I struggled with lighting in general. I had to use a couple of lights to try and enhance the lighting but the shadows weren’t working with me either. I couldn’t really find things for backdrops and since money is a bit… tight at the moment I decided to try and work with what I’ve got. I also didn’t have any furniture that could help me so it was a bit tough working with angles.
Production – taking pictures
I always shoot in Manual so there was no struggle there but something I normally have to depend on is Auto Focus because my eyesight is not good and I don’t trust my images to be clear for other people. Because of the issues with lighting, I had to keep my camera on the tripod most of the time because I wanted a lot of depth, which made my shutter speed very slow.
I also switched to RAW because it was a recommendation but I have no space in my card anymore so sadly I had most of them shot in High-Quality JPEG.
Post-production
Chosen images before editing
Images after editing
For the image of a glass of lemon water, I wanted it to be more vibrant and warm for the image to feel more like a tropical summer than how cold it is right now in Courtenay.
The original image for the apple and peanut butter snack was way too dark so I played around with whites and blacks after fixing the exposure so that it would look a bit more lively and less gloomy. I made the temperature a bit colder because the image was too yellow for my taste.
The avocado toast photo just needed a fix in exposure and temperature. The images started looking too warm by the end of the photoshoot.
Presentation
The topic for this project was food. The research that went into it was mainly reading the links provided by the instructor. I did look up an extra definition for the word itself. According to Oxford Languages, food is defined as “any nutritious substance that people or animals eat or drink or that plants absorb in order to maintain life and growth.”
The main idea for this project was to capture still life (food in our case) with natural light. I decided to look for more visual inspiration on the subject on Pinterest. I noticed that most of the time the images tend to get very close to the object being photographed and the backgrounds are more often than not white, gray, or just plain wood.
As for my process of taking pictures, I had to take most, if not all, of my pictures with my camera on a tripod because the lighting on the day I took the photos was not great. On top of that, no matter where I am in my apartment I don’t get a lot of natural light shining in. Because of this, my shutter speed was usually very slow, even when I used extra lights to try and make the shots brighter. This is why most of the editing is just changing the temperature and exposure/WB of the images. I didn’t really feel like my images needed extra editing in photoshop since I personally didn’t find I need any content-filling or erasing and the basic editing was already done in LRC.
What I learned in this project is that it actually takes a whole lot of effort to stage and photograph still life. You have to really think about what mood you are trying to evoke and that lighting might not work with you a lot of the time so you have to be very resourceful. In regards to where I might be headed with photography… I think I will highly likely just keep it as a hobby and not get too technical about it.